A few remarks, not necessarily disagreements with anything specific:
“hire a bunch of people and tell them to try a bunch of things according to some general guidelines, rather than explicitly micromanaging them” is causally upstream of trying out those things.
Given access to the same resources, sufficiently smart humans are usually capable of explicit strategy stealing of any other human or group of humans in full generality and on any level of meta. Though object-level strategy stealing of your competitors might not always be a good strategy, as you point out.
“figure out what things work locally, do those things, and iterate.” Agreed that this is a good strategy in general. I’m saying that an individual explicitly reflecting on and reasoning about what an organization is trying to do and the strategy they’re using to do it, should always help, or at least not hurt, if done correctly and at the right level of generality and meta. We might disagree about how strong those preconditions are, and how likely they are to be met in practice.
A few remarks, not necessarily disagreements with anything specific:
“hire a bunch of people and tell them to try a bunch of things according to some general guidelines, rather than explicitly micromanaging them” is causally upstream of trying out those things.
Given access to the same resources, sufficiently smart humans are usually capable of explicit strategy stealing of any other human or group of humans in full generality and on any level of meta. Though object-level strategy stealing of your competitors might not always be a good strategy, as you point out.
“figure out what things work locally, do those things, and iterate.” Agreed that this is a good strategy in general. I’m saying that an individual explicitly reflecting on and reasoning about what an organization is trying to do and the strategy they’re using to do it, should always help, or at least not hurt, if done correctly and at the right level of generality and meta. We might disagree about how strong those preconditions are, and how likely they are to be met in practice.
All of those remarks look correct to me. Though “at the right level of generality and meta” is doing a lot of the work.